Modernism and the Epic

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Mark-Georg Dehrmann
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature) ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2015 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 271140818

My purpose is to write a monograph that investigates the presence of the epic in modernist literature and culture (1900 to 1945). It will take into account not only German literature, but wants to outline the impact of the epic on modernism as a transnational phenomenon. Research on the modern epic is relatively scarce. Apparently, criticism has widely accepted that, while the epic had thrived in ancient times, it was now 'dead' - a notion that had formed (in Germany) around 1800. Yet, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, this notion paradoxically led to an almost uncanny presence of the epic in literature, criticism, philology, and historiography. The 'dead' genre presented images of heroic times, homogenous societies, of an unalienated life and a wholesomeness long lost to modernity. Thus, the genre of epic lived on both as a monument of a fulfilled past and as a provocation to renew the genre and with it the forms of society it seemed to vouch for. While the 19th century was obsessed by the notion of a 'national epic', the attractiveness of the genre extended to the modernist and even avant-garde authors of the early 20th century as well. The study will trace the transformations of the epic in works of Alfred Döblin, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Johannes R. Becher, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Jorge Luis Borges, and John R. R. Tolkien. The appeal of the 'dead' genre stimulates new forms of writing that are commonly associated with modernism, such as fragmentation, collage, montage, de-individualization. Transformations of epic writing can be ironic and subversive, but more often they tend to affirm, support, and enact totalitarian notions. Therefore, the study will emphasize the political dimension of the modern epic as well. Other key aspects will be transmedial reflections on the epic in motion pictures and painting as well as its role in material culture (book market and book design).The study starts from the hypothesis that what triggered and stimulated the transformations of the genre, were the intense philological debates on the epic throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. They provided the genre with its alleged aura, while Hegel with his still familiar position on the epic was only one of many voices. These interactions between philology/literary criticism and literature shaped the modernist transformations of the epic and thus had a crucial impact on the formation of modernism in general.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants